MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

ksmiller99 — Sat, 05 Sep 2015 16:01:56 GMT

One of my first jobs was for cash-register sales and repair place. This before the advent of UPC bar codes (or at least before they were popular) and we sold and installed this kit for automatic inventory control and pricing using the C64. The keyboards on the cash registers used serial TTL and ASCII to communicate with the main board, and this kit redirected the register keyboard output to the C64, Instead of inputting the price, the user would input a 5-7 digit product code created by the shop owner. The C64 would look up the price and and send the ASCII of the price back to the register's main board and update the inventory. This was in about 1983 or 1984. I remember the wonder I felt at all the practical possibilities that this technology presented.

Kevin

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

element14Dave — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 15:21:33 GMT

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RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

balearicdynamics — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 08:37:43 GMT

Commodore PET fans , do you have saw this ? https://www.commodore-pet.com/shop/

It seems that the elder PET Commodore has been rebirth [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-e138be37-fd6e-4098-ab11-504bf6b77214/8306.contentimage_5F00_2516.png:16:16]

Enrico

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

mstrohb — Mon, 27 Jul 2015 10:18:35 GMT

I started on the TRS-80 using BASIC. The local RadioShack manager would let me use their demo model, if I left it running some kind of animation to get people's attention. That machine had nothing but character graphics, but the blocky Enterprise destroyed the blocky Klingon warship with its jaggedy phaser many times! I'm still doing programming today due to starting with that.

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

dogrox — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 10:23:38 GMT

I remember back in the eighties, when the Commodore 64 scene I was pretty into it. I used to repair the Commodore 64 computers and resell them, as people were giving them to me because they were dead :-) I was also doing machine language coding and music for intros for various groups back then. Oh how I miss those days.

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

e14 Contributor — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 18:30:23 GMT

Unless my search function is malfunctioning, I'm astonished that as yet nobody seems to have mentioned my first personal computer. The Nascom 1:

Nascom 1 - Computing History

Before that we had a computer at school in the the late 1960s. In those days there were no computers in schools, so we had to build our own. The components were a large pile of Post Office surplus relays, a uniselector and a lot of wire. I/O consisted of a row of toggle switches and a row of bulbs, plus a push button to enter each machine code instruction once the switches had been set up appropriately. It took a long time to program it to compute 2+2, but it was very satisfying when it eventually lit the correct bulbs!

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

neilk — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 11:01:49 GMT

Returning the BBC Micro, I left school long before they came along, but I owned a BBC Model B and took it into work, where it got us out of a very expensive hole!

I was involved in a research project: Continuous 24 hour ambulatory monitoring of intragastric pH in man, Clinical Physics and Physiological Measurement, 1987, Volume 8, abstract viewable here, if anyone is interested

http://iopscience.iop.org/0143-0815/8/2/003;jsessionid=D270307E0F6BBBD0F4DB3E105E45D121.c2

We needed to digitise the data for our DataGeneral Eclipse (mentioned in another post), but an ADC from DG was going to set us back between £2000 and £3000 GPpunds (can't remember the exact figure) - in 1985 that was a LOT of cash and we couldn't raise it. The ADC wasn't part of the original project funding because we planned to do the digitisation on someone else's Eclipse. That proved to be logistically difficult - booking time, travelling, transporting tapes and disk cartridges, etc - so we looked for an in-house solution.

The sampling rate needed was quite low, well within the capabilities of the BBC B, writing the data to floppy. We then set up a serial link between the BBC and the Eclipse and sent the data across as bytes, reconstructing the original data on the Eclipse. This worked very well and contributed towards the award of a PhD to the first named author of the publication.

Thanks BBC Model B and the clever folk who specified and designed it - in many ways, it was ahead of it's time!

Neil

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

4ringfan — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 09:03:24 GMT

This just in!

The Commodore Pet is alive again! Well, at least the name is. It is on an entirely different product however. Take a look:

COMMODORE PET

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

dragonstyne — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 21:38:26 GMT

Alas, i traded mine for a C64.

[][][]Steve

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

e14 Contributor — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 08:16:34 GMT

My first memories of computing were watching my Dad solder together a ZX80 (the first home computer in the UK for under £100). After that, my brother got a ZX Spectrum (which I later inherited, when he bought a Sirius, I think it was) and I got my first computer, the TI-99/4a.

Lots of great memories of early coding, on the ZX80, TI (seem to recall getting a BASIC cartridge) and the Spectrum - joke books, text arcade games, typing in scripts from magazines (which, in one case, didn't work and when I wrote to the magazine they assured me it must have been me... only to print a correction in a later issue!), Mandelbrot sets (yes, on the Spectrum - we had to render in B&W due to the colour bleed).

I had a friend with the BBC (and a floppy disk, iirc) but only really recall plaing Chuckie Egg and Elite on that - not programming.

-- Ian

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

balearicdynamics — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 14:49:38 GMT

Do someone remember the TI99 aiming to be the competitor or C64 with very few luck (at least in Italy) ?

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

dragonstyne — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 14:34:21 GMT

Some of the memory expansion cartridges for the VIC 20 and the C 64 had a spot on the board for a DIP switch to be installed for address assignment. There was also a card expander that supported a DIP for memory assignment. With this, people would copy game cartrages.

There was a popular game called Blue Max for the C 64. The programmer, from my recollection, was involved in the development of the C 64 kernel ROM. He knew the ROM package was in fact an EEPROM. He put a little code in Blue Max that would rewrite he kernel, place a little message on the screen in contempt, the 64 would reboot and from then on you would have flashing multicolored characters.

The folks would then call Commodore complaining about a computer failure and be told because they were stealing software there was nothing they would do.

The computer could be fixed by rewriting the kernel.

[][][]Steve

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

mhitchin2003 — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 12:20:21 GMT

My clearest memory of using the C64 was waiting 14 minutes to load a game from a tape for it to fail at 13 minutes and 50 seconds. It took 3 attempts to load it and each time it failed. I gave up on it and never played it. My favorite game was on a cartridge called Robocop and I played this all the time. I never got in to coding as once you committed a line of code you could not edit it and if there was a mistake, you had to type it all again.

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

gadget.iom — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:05:45 GMT

My first introduction to computing was thanks to a 'donated' Commodore VIC-20, the lesser known predecessor to the Commodore 64. The BASIC interpreter on this machine is solely responsible for getting me hooked on programming. [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-e138be37-fd6e-4098-ab11-504bf6b77214/2804.contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

I wasted many hours in my youth waiting for programs to load from audio tape on the Datasette.

[View:/resized-image/__size/1024x768/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-e138be37-fd6e-4098-ab11-504bf6b77214/contentimage_5F00_181549.jpg:1024:768]

RE: MicroMemories of a Silicon School Day

e14 Contributor — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 10:34:45 GMT

We had two rooms for our IT class. One had some Macs where we did lot's of clicking and messing about with a gui and the other was full of Micros. The Micros were always the best actually getting to make the computer do something you wanted with its big clunky keys, saving our work to flimsy floppy disks. I hadn't actually thought about that for ages. [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-e138be37-fd6e-4098-ab11-504bf6b77214/5773.contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]